Few would survive. ©2020 AETN UK. It consisted of a struggle between French and Viet Minh (Vietnamese Communist and nationalist) forces for control of a small mountain outpost on the Vietnamese border near Laos. Lessons, it seems, that were not heeded by the Americans as they embarked on their own futile fight in Vietnam later in the decade. History. Not long after, the Americans rocked up but that’s for another time. Belligerents: France & The State of Vietnam vs Viet Minh, ‘You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties.’. Thus the last word to come out of the main fortress, as it was being overrun, came at 5:50 p.m. from the radio operator of the 31st Combat Engineer Battalion, using his code name: This is Yankee Metro. During his last trip to Vietnam in February 1967, Fall chose to accompany a platoon of the 1st Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment, on Operation Chinook II, a search-and-destroy mission. They were divided into groups dependent on their health and those who could were marched on foot 600 km (roughly the distance from London to Edinburgh) to prison camps in the north and east of the country – intermingled with Việt Minh soldiers to discourage the French from attempting bombing raids. Describing the scene to journalist Wilfred Burchett, Hồ Chí Minh took off his helmet, turned it upside down and said ‘Down here is the valley of Dien Bien Phu. In 1957 Fall joined the faculty of Howard University as professor of international relations, and he spent the summer of that year in South Vietnam. They then turned their attention to Anne-Marie and Gabrielle which took a couple of days but they too were overrun and with them, the use of the airfields. The Viet Minh victory in this battle effectively ended the eight-year-old war. Ferocious fighting ensued and while the French must have known they were done for, they continued to fight to the last man. This now seems finally to have been understood in the South Vietnam war as well, and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara may well have thought of Dien Bien Phu when he stated in his major Vietnam policy speech of March 26, 1964, that we have learned that in Vietnam, political and economic progress are the sine qua non of military success…. One cannot understand the full significance of the battle of Dien Bien Phu without situating it in its Franco-Vietnamese, international, and military dimensions. The town of Dien Bien Phu sits in Vietnam’s north-western corner on the border with Laos. This was the first time that an Asian force had defeated a European force in pitched battle. During World War II, Japan’s aggression allowed them to take control but the Việt Minh, a national independence coalition led by Hồ Chí Minh, fought the Japanese and by the end of the war had driven them out - only for the French to return and reassert their rule. On May 7, 1954, the end of the battle for the jungle fortress of Dien Bien Phu marked the end of French military influence in Asia, just as the sieges of Port Arthur, Corregidor and Singapore had, to a certain extent, broken the spell of Russian, American and British hegemony in Asia. Fall will be remembered by history as one of the foremost authorities on the Vietnam War. They can be lost just as conclusively through a series of very small engagements, such as those now fought in South Vietnam, if the local government and its population lose confidence in the eventual outcome of the contest — and that was the case both for the French and for their Vietnamese allies after Dien Bien Phu. You’re not going to shoot anymore? By 3 p.m., however, it had become obvious that the fortress would not last until nightfall. I feel the end is approaching, but we will fight to the finish. The massive crater they made remains visible to this day. At the same time, Vietnam was divided at the 17th Parallel into the Communist-controlled North Vietnam and the democratic South Vietnam and a particularly uneasy peace persisted for a little over a year until the Americans arrived. The day after the battle ended, the Geneva Conference convened with the intention, amongst other geopolitical issues, to settle the outstanding issues brought about by the Korean and First Indochina Wars. A few figures tell how murderous the air war around Dien Bien Phu was: Of the 420 aircraft available in all of Indochina then, 62 were lost in connection with Dien Bien Phu and 167 sustained hits. For a time, a U.S. Air Force strike was considered, but the idea was dropped for about the same reasons that make a similar attack against North Vietnam today rather risky. The net effect of Dien Bien Phu on France’s military posture in Indochina could not be measured in losses alone. 08/May/2020. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu is seen as the decisive battle of the First Indochina War between French troops and the Viet Minh (League for the Independence of Vietnam), a nationalist, pro-Soviet Union movement of Ho Chi Minh. The victory the French were so sure of was turning into a humiliating defeat. The defence of Dien Bien Phu was a gamble, whose odds were not understood by the French. After eight years of fighting and with the French strategists propped up by American money, they tried tactic after unsuccessful tactic but eventually ran out of ideas. At 1:50 a.m. on May 8, 1954, came the last message from the doomed garrison, relayed by the watchdog aircraft to Hanoi: Sortie failed — Stop — Can no longer communicate with you — Stop and end. There had been suggestions that an orderly surrender be arranged, to save the wounded the added anguish of falling into enemy hands as isolated individuals. He first came to the United States in 1951 as a Fulbright Scholar, receiving his Master of Arts and Ph.D. in political science at Syracuse University. I am responsible. Trip Historic was designed to give users a smooth and simple experience that will allow them to find the historic places they’re looking for, from the most well-known sites in the world to incredible historical locations that can’t be found in the guide books. The Red Cross took about 850 of the most badly wounded and of the 8,000 or so who walked, less than half survived the journey through a mixture of disease, starvation and then the horrific prison conditions when they finally arrived. The artillery duel became the great tragedy of the battle. But what you have done until now surely is magnificent. Four of the eight strongpoints were from one to three miles away from the center of the position. But as the position shrank every day (it finally was the size of a ballpark), the bulk of the supplies fell into Communist hands. De Castries ticked off a long list of 800-man battalions, which had been reduced to companies of 80 men, and of companies that were reduced to the size of weak platoons. This totally stalemated situation required the French to create a military situation that would permit cease-fire negotiations on a basis of equality with the enemy. What you have done is too magnificent to do such a thing. Cogny’s last conversation with de Castries dealt with the problem of what to do with the wounded piled up under the incredible conditions in the various strongpoints and in the fortress’ central hospital — originally built to contain 42 wounded. In amongst all theperma-famous culture references was the line ‘Dien Bien Phu falls, Rock Around the Clock’ and it’s probably fair to say that this one may have got some people stumped. In Laos the situation was just as grim then as it is now: The Laotian and French forces held the Mekong valley and the airfields of the Plain of Jars, and the enemy held the rest. Yet, he said, that is exactly what it was. VNA/VNS File Photo By early March 1954, enemy troops numbering more than 16,000 had gathered in Điện Biên Phủ, including the most elite military units in Indochina. On this day in 1954, victory at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu When the Viet Minh forces captured the fortified French base at Dien Bien Phu on 07 May 1954, it was a spectacular victory. Well, good-bye, mon vieux, said Cogny. THE END OF FRENCH OCCUPATION Dien Bien Phu was the battle that finally ended the French occupation of Vietnam. The French gun crews and artillery pieces, working entirely in the open so as to allow the pieces all-around fields of fire, were destroyed one by one; replaced, they were destroyed once more, and at last fell silent. With communism now a menace at both ends of the Far Eastern arc, the Indochina War changed from a colonial war into a crusade — but a crusade without a real cause. The battle of Dien Bien Phu opposed in 1954 the French army and the Vietnamese communist forces of Viêt-minh in the deep plain of Diên Biên Phu, located in the north-west of Vietnam, near the border with Laos. These words were said to Billy Joel by a friend of John Lennon’s son Sean, so the 40-year old New Yorker decided to write a song to prove him wrong. One may only hope that the lesson has been learned in time. Dien Bien Phu was the decisive battle of the First Indochina War. By the time the battle started in earnest on March 13, 1954, the garrison already had suffered 1,037 casualties without any tangible result. And as deputy to General de Castries, he felt he had contributed to the air of overconfidence that had prevailed in the valley prior to the attack. In 1954, French forces in French Indochina sought to cut the Viet Minh's supply lines to Laos. The decision was made then to fight on to the end, as long as the ammunition lasted, and let individual units be overrun after destruction of their heavy weapons. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was fought from March 13th to May 8th 1954 near the Laotian Border. As Dien Bien Phu battles drew to the end, the Geneva Accords were signed by the involving countries resulting in the departure of the French from Indochina and the temporary division of Vietnam into: Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). ‘Unstoppable waves’ of 25,000 machine gun-toting Việt Minh infantry engaged the last 3,000 able-bodied French garrison soldiers in brutal hand-to-hand combat. They ended up simply defending their positions and reacting to Việt Minh attacks when they occurred. French losses proved so great that the reinforcements parachuted in after the airfield was destroyed for good on March 27 never sufficed to mount the counterattacks necessary to reconquer the outposts. In the latter epic, Fall describes in extraordinary detail not only the failures but also the heroism that took place in what he calls one of the most decisive battles of the 20th century. At 9:40 p.m., a French surveillance aircraft reported to Hanoi that it saw the strongpoint’s depots blowing up and that heavy artillery fire was visible close by. As the final assault began on May 1st and, one by one the French positions were falling, Giap established trenches in the valley until there was only Elaine left and on May 6th Giap unleashed the full might of his infantry force upon it and the French within it. Until Red China’s victorious forces arrived on Vietnam’s borders in December 1949, there had been at least a small hope that the French-supported Vietnamese nationalist government, headed by ex-emperor Bao Dai, could wean away from the Communist-led Viet Minh the allegiance of much of Vietnam’s population. There never was, as press maps of the time erroneously showed, a continuous battle line covering the whole valley. General Vo Nguyen Giap decided to take Dien Bien Phu by an extremely efficient mixture of 19th-century siege techniques (sinking TNT-laden mineshafts under French bunkers, for example) and modern artillery patterns plus human-wave attacks. But Cogny was adamant on that point: Mon vieux, of course you have to finish the whole thing now. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by Historynet LLC, the world's largest publisher of history magazines. Rabindra Hazari. The situation is very grave. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was fought from March 13th to May 8th 1954 near the Laotian Border. French Prime Minister René Mayer was a strong believer in strengthening France’s role in Europe and the Atlantic community. Not long after, a white flag was hoisted high from a rifle over Colonel Christian de Castries’ bunker, not 20 metres from a flat-helmeted Việt Minh soldier. It was during that time that he succeeded in visiting Communist North Vietnam and interviewing Ho Chi Minh. Bernard Fall wrote that in comparison with other world battles, Dien Bien Phu could hardly qualify as a major battle, let alone a decisive one. Then de Castries said his final words: Bien, mon général. Dien Bien Phu: the battle that split Vietnam Save 50% on a BBC History Magazine or BBC History Revealed subscription France’s catastrophic defeat at Dien Bien Phu in northwest Vietnam in May 1954 ended its hopes of maintaining any influence in Indochina and set … This article by the late Bernard B. An Dien Battle. When the battle ended, the 82,926 parachutes expended in supplying the fortress covered the battlefield like freshly fallen snow — or like a burial shroud. 4. After many years of foreign subjugation and a burning desire for independence, the Việt Minh started a guerrilla war against the French in 1946. As it turned out, the Viet Minh had more than 200 artillery pieces, reinforced during the last week of the siege by Russian Katyusha multiple rocket launchers. The sheer magnitude of preparing that mass of supplies for parachuting was solved only by superhuman feats of the airborne supply units on the outside — efforts more than matched by the heroism of the soldiers inside the valley, who had to crawl into the open, under fire, to collect the containers. The airdrops were a harrowing experience in that narrow valley, which permitted only straight approaches. By the start of 1954, it had cost the French and Americans $3 billion – hardly pocket change so soon after World War II – and was referred to as la sale guerre, or ‘the dirty war.’ In addition, accusations of military incompetence, corruption, currency deals and arms trading blighted the war effort. The French army would establish a fortified airhead by air-lifting soldiers adjacent to a key Vie… Well, do as best you can, leaving it to your [static: subordinate units?] An American reporter finds himself in the middle of the 57-day battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam between the French army and the Vietminh, which finally resulted in the defeat and surrender of the French forces and France's eventual withdrawal from Vietnam. In just a short time, thousands of kilometres of … Their original aim was to spread the word of Christianity and as the 19th century came around, Vietnam’s independence had been gradually eroded until by 1884, the entire country – known then as French Indochina – had come under the rule of France. What had happened at Dien Bien Phu was simply that a momentous gamble had been attempted by the French high command and had backfired badly. Umberto Eco, Italian novelist (The Name of the Rose). It proved little else but that an encircled force, no matter how valiant, will succumb if its support system fails.’. The outlying posts, which protected the key airfield, were captured within the first few days of the battle. Dien Bien Phu, 1954, was the final battle of the first Indo-China war. But with the existence of a Red Chinese sanctuary for the Viet Minh forces, that became militarily impossible. Eight thousand miles away, in Geneva, the Vietnamese and Red Chinese delegations attending the nine-power conference that was supposed to settle both the Korean and the Indochinese conflicts toasted the event with pink Chinese champagne. The great battle in the valley of Dien Bien Phu was over. The battle of Dien Bien Phu (DBP) was a decisive engagement during the Indochina War (1946-54). A conflict between Communist Viet Minh forces and a French-established garrison, it occurred in a town called Seat of the Border County Prefecture or, in Vietnamese, Dien Bien Phu. Battalion commander Nguyen Dung Chi recalled the events of the final hours of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu: ‘The assault ended in hand-to-hand fighting ... We couldn't see anything any longer, we didn't try to take aim, we just moved forward, jumping from trench to trench, stepping on bodies.’, ‘Silence had fallen on Dien Bien Phu. Essentially, the battle of Dien Bien Phu degenerated into a brutal artillery duel, which the enemy would have won sooner or later. From then onward the struggle for Dien Bien Phu became a battle of attrition. Dien Bien Phu Battle Analysis. On that day in May 1954 it had become apparent by 10 a.m. that Dien Bien Phu’s position was hopeless. Soon the combination of monsoon rains, which set in around mid-April, and Viet Minh artillery fire smashed to rubble the neatly arranged dugouts and trenches shown to eminent visitors and journalists during the early days of the siege. It was here, in the area that he had written about with much emotion, that Bernard Fall was killed by the explosion of a land mine, along with Gunnery Sergeant Byron Highland, a Marine combat photographer.